Want to Know The Secret To Staff Retention?

Engender loyalty by engaging your employees in the company

According to the recent Australian Institute of Management's (AIM) National Salary Survey 2007, there is further negative fallout from the ongoing skills shortage, with voluntary staff turnover rates at 12.6 per cent for 2006/2007, up from 11.5 per cent in the previous year and significantly up from the 9.9 per cent rate in the 2003/2004 year.

The Survey reports that 60.9 per cent of large company employees resigned to pursue career progression or promotion opportunities. Peter Davis, Managing Director, Frontline Recruitment Group, says many nations are struggling to find talent and then retain them. “The United Kingdom, the US, Australia, New Zealand: they’re all being impacted by the skills-shortage,” he says.

With the skills shortage now an acknowledged impediment for business, the focus has switched to finding new solutions. In Australia, the Federal Government has developed a National Skills Shortages Strategy to address the problem, particularly in the trades.

Organisations are starting to discover that the secret to retaining valued staff has less to do with money and is more about creating a culture people enjoy being a part of. The greatest driver of your team's success is their level of engagement. Engaged employees are less likely to resign, unlikely to call in sick when they are not sick, consistently do more than what is required, and have far greater levels of quality and productivity.

Jobs aren't for life, and employees don't have to care...

The days when management could expect undying loyalty simply because they have employed someone have gone forever. And in many cases, it's the employees near the bottom of the ladder - those who are often treated poorly and are underpaid - that have most personal interaction with customers. That's a worry, isn't it?

So, what can be done differently to create a working environment that continues to keep employees happy and engaged, in turn producing greater productivity?

First, let's look at several key indicators of employee engagement. Most experts agree they include individual participation, open communication, innovation, continuous improvement, and empowerment. When these are evident in a workforce, engagement nearly always exists, as does productivity.

So, how can we produce these indicators of engagement? To exist, they require that four critical conditions be present in the workplace:

Hire the right people for the right job

Does your hiring process focus on identifying candidates with the right skills and talent. That’s a great start but you also need to find the candidate with the attitude that fits your organisation, helping ensure they'll be more likely to stay.

It follows, then, that we must be very careful about the people we hire, by using job and function-based interviewing, as well as pre-hiring investigative techniques. It's also important that all levels of management understand the difference between talent - which cannot be taught or transferred from one person to another - and skills and knowledge, which can.

Another way to keep employees happy and engaged is to stop promoting or moving them into areas that do not match their talents There's an old adage that says, "we do best what we best like to do." In other words, we excel when we're involved in things that interest us and which use our strengths rather than our weaknesses. When we have an interest in an activity, and we're using a strength to complete it, it's often viewed as "fun" instead of "work" and we therefore put our mental, physical, and emotional being into it.

Non-financial Support

Keys to providing non-financial support include communicating frequently, recognising your employees' accomplishments, creating a positive work culture and promote a healthy work-life balance. These are very effective engagement tools and ones that you see employers of choice promoting throughout their organisations at all levels.

Here are some ways to provide support that will help you retain your best employees:

• Communicate frequently and when possible face-to-face rather than by email. E-mail, while great for disseminating policies and procedures, is also impersonal. The best way to communicate effectively is in person. And remember communication is a two-way process, so seek feedback. Ask your employees how you can help them, and how you can create a better work environment. And when they make good recommendations, act on them.

• Reward and recognise good performance. When a goal is reached, celebrate and make sure you use intrinsic motivators and extrinsic rewards. Extrinsic rewards are tangible like pay increases and bonuses. Intrinsic motivators are feelings of satisfaction or accomplishment that come from within an employee: a sense of achievement, purpose, empowerment, ownership. If you can get someone to believe in an idea or align their values with what you want, then you have set very powerful motivation in place. Make sure you use both.

• Create a culture of fun. Ask your team members to come up with fun ideas for a competition. Hold office sweepstakes for sporting events, horse races, or awards shows.

• Promote flexibility so that people have a work/life balance. Understand that workers are people with lives, families, and obligations outside of work. A seismic shift in has been documented by numerous studies over recent years, conceding to the importance of work-life balance. In the USA the Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC), recently released results of a global survey of 138 executive recruiters that found more than eight out of 10 (85 percent) have had candidates reject a plum job offer because of work-life balance considerations.

Provide Opportunities to Grow

Good training starts on day one. Make sure a new recruit clearly understands what the organization expects from them. Similarly, listen to their expectations and be sure to address them appropriately. Great organisations provide opportunities for development, growth, and advancement. Ways to assist employees include:

• Send employees to seminars, conferences, and networking functions. Use your training budget, that’s why you have one.

• Offer inter-departmental training opportunities. Not only will employees gain more skills, they'll also get a better sense of how they fit into the organisation as a whole.

• Create a development plan for each employee based on his or her individual goals. Sit privately with each team member and find out what their goals are, and then help each individual to stay on track with his or her development plan.

• Involve employees in decision-making and problem solving. You'll get great ideas, and you'll create a more engaged team.

• Empower your employees. Set expectations, set boundaries, and allow employees to make decisions within those boundaries. Not only will they feel a greater sense of ownership and responsibility, but you'll be freed up to focus on making improvements instead of monitoring day-to-day activities.

Establishing the right mix of talent on teams

Remember point 1? “Hire the right people” with the right attitude. Hire people that will fit with the corporate culture AND the team culture. Maximise team interaction, both at and outside of work. Outside of work, organise a team dinner; donate time or resources to those in need (as a team); take your team out for lunch (offsite if possible - if not, make sure the conversation isn't about work). Find ways, both formal and informal, to get your team together.

In summary, competitive pay levels are important, but if you want to dramatically reduce turnover, recruit people with the right attitude, spend a portion of every day focusing on supporting employees, build positive work and personal relationships, and provide opportunities for development and growth and establish the right mix of talent on your teams. What's more, engaged employees are the key to building meaningful customer experiences, but that’s a story for another day!

Please feel free to contact us at Frontline Retail. with any recruitment requirements - we are here to help.